Why farmers long to be understood by non-farmers mystifies me. First, I’m not sure I understand farmers, since there is no stereotypical farmer, just a bunch of similar but equally puzzling individuals.
Given the statistics, however, it seems presumptuous others are obligated to understand us. Despite the wildly misleading “2% of the population”, the number of actual farming-for-a-living people is a sliver of the U.S. population. Being generous, that is maybe 0.3%. It would be astonishing if others did understand how we live.
WHAT DO YOU KNOW?
Even more curious is how little farmers understand other ways of life. We show scant interest about life in San Antonio or Dubuque or Biloxi. With few facts, farmers tend to be horrified by the prospect of urban life.
What we know is axiomatic: City folk aren’t like us. Other than pizza delivery and cable internet, we find little to envy and much to dislike.
Empathy for urban lives is rare. It’s filed away under “Good place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.”
This purposeful unfamiliarity has economic consequences. Farmers project their driving patterns to urbanites. When work is 14 miles away, electric vehicles are a practical breakthrough. While we scoff, the auto and energy industries will be rebuilt for the 99%.
As rural and urban lives diverge, understanding why urban dwellers think as they do is too much trouble for too little reward. Life in an eighth-floor apartment, enduring obnoxious supervisors and coworkers, wasting too much life on a freeway or train, lacking control of your time, and being constantly surrounded by people unsettle us.
Imagining those lives instead of the farm life is perplexing and more than a little scary. Why go there?
For instance, fewer farm sons attend college, like many other young men shunning higher education. This choice erodes one of the most effective experiences to bridge urban/rural differences. When farm children choose urban careers and homes, family relationships can be strained by misapprehension, and even disapproval.
Transplanted farm offspring remember rural life, but not those who never leave. This information imbalance underlies many difficult estate problems among other issues.
A TWO-WAY STREET
That we should be disdainful of the overwhelming majority of Americans and in the same breath demand financial support and respect from them is bizarre and self-defeating. We see respect as prestige, like salutes to a superior, instead of simple courtesy.
Moreover, respect is a two-way street. When urban lives trigger a suspicion they think they’re better than we are, it is a reflection of our own attitude.
John Phipps, a farmer from Chrisman, Ill., is the on-farm “U.S. Farm Report” commentator.
